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In the working-class neighborhood of Tehran surrounding Imam Hussein Square, side streets and alleys are lined with second-hand shops and small repair shops that refurbish all manner of household appliances. But with little to do, most shopkeepers idle outside their stores.A 60-year-old man named Abbas and his son Asgar, 32, sat on two of the second-hand faux-brocade chairs they sell. When asked about their business, Abbas, who did not want his last name used for fear of attracting government attention, seemed incredulous."Just look down the street," he said. "Business is bad. There are no customers, people are economically weak now, they have no money."After years of debilitating U.S. sanctions that have generated chronic inflation, compounded by Iran’s economic mismanagement and corrupti...

A scientist whose research was at the center of a controversy over a potential Alzheimer's drug has been charged with fraud.A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Hoau-Yan Wang, a professor at the City College of New York, on charges of falsifying data to obtain grants totaling about $16 million from the National Institutes of Health.Dr. Wang’s studies have supported research on a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease and on simufilam, a drug in late-stage clinical trials. Simufilam’s maker, Cassava Sciences, a Texas-based pharmaceutical company, has claimed that the drug improves cognition in Alzheimer’s patients.Alzheimer's disease affects about six million Americans, a number that is expected to double by 2050, and promising treatments generate enormous excitement. Cassava&...

The leader of the The whole world gang — Marat’s brother, Vova — has also just returned from battle, having served in the brutal Soviet-Afghan war. He seems unfazed by what he saw there. None of his peers seem curious, either. Such is the aesthetic world of the series: empty to the point of being impenetrable. The director, Zhora Kryzhovnikov, rarely lets the camera wander beyond the rectilinear confines of the apartment blocks. The period details are eerily accurate, but I still have no idea what Kazan actually looks like. The plot is somehow frenetic and inert.The play is set at a critical moment. Everyone knows the Soviet Union is collapsing, but no one knows what will happen next. In one of his few moments of effective irony, Vova reflects on the future. “I listened to Gorbachev,” he s...

A federal judge on Wednesday upheld the first legal challenge to the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements, which is scheduled to take effect in September.Judge Ada Brown granted an injunction sought by several plaintiffs, saying the ban cannot be enforced against them pending a final ruling.But while the ruling was preliminary, it said the FTC had no “substantive authority to issue regulations” regarding unfair competition practices and that the plaintiffs “would likely succeed on the merits” of their challenge.Judge Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas said he expects to issue a final decision by the end of August.The commission “supports our clear authority, supported by statute and precedent, to issue this rule,” said Douglas Farrar, a s...

The evacuation order issued this week by the Israeli military concerns about a third of the Gaza Strip, at a time when the local population is increasingly ill-equipped to manage repeated forced displacements, after nearly nine months of war that have left tens of thousands dead and wounded and put the territory at risk of famine.The order, which the United Nations estimates affects about 250,000 people, is the largest since October, when about a million residents of the northern Gaza Strip were ordered to leave their homes, the organization said Tuesday."It's an endless cycle of death and displacement," Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the main U.N. agency that helps Palestinians, UNRWA, said in voice messages from central Gaza on Wednesday. "People here are expressing that they ar...

V. Craig Jordan, a pharmacologist whose discovery that a failed contraceptive, tamoxifen, could block the growth of breast cancer cells opened a new class of drugs and helped save the lives of millions of women, died June 9 at his home in Houston. He was 76.Balkees Abderrahman, a researcher who worked closely with Dr. Jordan and cared for him for several years, said the cause was kidney cancer.Dr. Jordan was known as a meticulous, even obsessive, researcher, a quality demonstrated in his work on tamoxifen. The drug was first synthesized in 1962, although it was discarded because it failed not only to prevent conception but, in some cases, to promote it.But Dr. Jordan, then a doctoral student at the University of Leeds in Britain, saw something no one else had. It had long been known that e...

One recent evening, when Tim Bushe decided to trim some hedges, he attracted more attention than usual for a routine garden job.Walkers slowed to take photos and ask questions. Neighbors stepped over piles of cut leaves to thank him. A driver honked his horn and gave a thumbs-up.Mr. Bushe is used to attention. It happens every time he gives his two giant, furry elephants a haircut. They are just one in a series of hedges on residential streets that Mr. Bushe has transformed from overgrown plants into whimsical creations. His hedge menagerie includes two cats, a squirrel, a hippopotamus, and a fish. There's even, experimentally, a naked woman lying down. He hopes a giant rabbit will join them this summer.Its hedges have delighted residents for years and baffled others who have stumbled ...

In May, CoreWeave, a provider of cloud computing services for AI companies, raised $1.1 billion, followed by $7.5 billion in debt, at a valuation of $19 billion. Scale AI, a data provider for AI companies, raised $1 billion, at a valuation of $13.8 billion. And xAI, founded by Elon Musk, raised $6 billion, at a valuation of $24 billion.These funding rounds have increased the overall deal volume in the industry, both in terms of dollar amount and number of deals, said Kyle Stanford, research analyst at PitchBook."It's not declining anymore," he said. "The bottom has already fallen out."The activity has prompted some venture capitalists to change their messaging. Last year, IVP investor Tom Loverro predicted a “mass extinction event” for startups and urged them to cut costs. Last week, h...

Firas Maksad, senior researcher at the Middle East Institute, wrote on X that there was still time for key players to find a diplomatic solution. Mr. Hochstein’s trip, he said, would likely take place Wednesday. “The window for diplomacy is closing but it’s not closed,” he said.Mr. Blinken, speaking Monday at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, said he did not believe the key players in the border conflict — Israel, Hezbollah and Iran — actually wanted to go to war, but that is where the “momentum” in the fighting could lead. U.S. officials fear such a conflict could force the United States to intervene on Israel’s behalf.“Nobody really wants a war,” Mr. Blinken said. He said Iran, a determined enemy of Israel, “wants to make sure that Hezbollah is not destro...

Life as a Florida carpenter ant can be brutal. These half-inch ants are territorial and have violent clashes with ants from rival colonies in the Southeast.Fighting can leave ants with leg injuries. But as scientists recently discovered, these ants have developed an effective treatment for the wounds: amputation.In the journal Current Biology on Tuesday, researchers reported that ants bite off injured limbs of their nestmates to prevent infection. Although other ant species are known to heal the wounds of their victims, typically by licking them clean, this is the first time an ant species is known to use amputation to heal a wound.The ants in the study performed amputations only on some leg injuries, suggesting that they are methodical in their surgical practices. Aside from humans, no ot...